Challenges, impacts and implications for the future
Sebastian Funk
https://epiforecasts.io
“We were losing ourselves in details […] all we needed to know is, are the number of cases rising, falling or levelling off?”
Hans Rosling, Liberia, 2014
\[ \begin{align} \textrm{New infections}~I(t) & = R_t \sum_{\tau} g_{\tau} I_{t-\tau}\\ \textrm{Reproduction number}~R(t) & = R_{t-1} \exp(\textrm{GP})\\ \textrm{Delayed reporting}~D(t) & = \sum_\tau \xi_\tau I_{t-\tau} \\ \textrm{Observations}~C(t) & = \mathrm{NegBin}(D_t \omega_{(t \textrm{mod} 7)}, \phi) \end{align} \]
Originally used methodology that ignored delays.
Davies et al., Science, 2021 Abbott et al., medRxiv, 2021 Sheratt et al., Proc Roy Soc B, 2021
“The Rt estimates generated by the EpiForecasts team were used extensively by the WHO COVID-19 Analytics unit. They formed a core part of two routine analysis pipelines […] regularly presented to the incident management structure at WHO headquarters, including senior management, as well as regional and national WHO offices.”
Workshop at WHO Hub Berlin (8-9 October, 2024)
“We were losing ourselves in details […] all we needed to know is, are the number of cases rising, falling or levelling off?”
Hans Rosling, Liberia, 2014
For more detail:
Abbott & Funk, 2022, Reflections on two years estimating effective reproduction numbers